- Amazing Brexit: Identity and Class Politics
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
This shell of a once fighting left embraces the culture of identity but excludes the entity of class. As a result poverty has become the P-word, and the poor the pariahs of neoliberal dystopic utopia. When we talk about class in a Marxist, materialist, scientific sense, we are talking about a relation of power, specifically about who does and who doesn’t have power to shape society. Identity politics makes this conflict of interests in society invisible. Neoliberal economics, however, is class war. It has advanced in part because identity politics depoliticized the public.
- Beyond the brexit debate
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Whatever the result of the Brexit referendum, of one thing we can be sure: Britain will neither be invaded by marauding Turks, as anti-EU campaigners suggest might happen if the country votes 'Yes', nor will Western civilization collapse, as EU president Donald Tusk fears after a 'No' vote. There will undoubtedly be economic and political turbulence, but Britain will not be staring into the abyss, however it votes.
- A Blow for Peace and Democracy
Why the British Said No to Europe
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.
- Brexit and the Diseased Liberal Mind
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The enraged liberal reaction to the Brexit vote is in full flood. The anger is pathological -- and helps to shed light on why a majority of Britons voted for leaving the European Union, just as earlier a majority of Labour party members voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
- Brexit Divides the British Left
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2019
Short commentary on three leftist perspectives on Brexit. The articles discussed are linked in the main piece.
- Brexit: the English and Welsh Enlightenment
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
By voting for Brexit the English and Welsh have switched on the light. And, as usual, when the light suddenly conquers the dark the cracks become obvious and the cockroaches scatter. It’s a beautiful sight. The speculators and the hoarders are running for cover. And their liberal apologists are blinded.
- Brexit: Establishment Freak Out
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The "masters of the universe" are shocked and displeased. Increasing numbers of voters are registering their anger, most recently by voting for Brexit in Great Britain. But many who voted for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the recent US primary season were motivated by similar frustrations. And before that, there was Occupy Wall Street, los Indignados in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and other massive protests elsewhere in Europe as well. The reason is simple.
- Brexit and the EU implosion
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The article looks into the construction of the European Union, Britaint's Brexit choice and Germany's hegemony, particularly in the euro zone.The author talks about a range of ways that financialised monopolies of the imperalist triad (Inited States, Europe, Japan) implement to dominate over the nations of the peripheries and force developing counties into the plunder of their national resources.
- Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The decision by U.K. voters to leave the EU is such a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions that -- for once- their failures have become a prominent part of the storyline.
- Brexit: It's Not About the EU, It's About the EZ
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
"Politics is the concentrated essence of economic forces in motion."
Forget the politics of the June 23 Brexit referendum for a minute. Let's take a look at the money.
- Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, and Contempt for Democracy
Introduction to the July 2, 2016 issue of Other Voices
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
A constant theme in elite reaction to the Brexit referendum, expressed especially through the mainstream media, has been a visceral contempt for democracy. Ordinary working people are portrayed as stupid and reactionary, incapable of understanding how wonderful the European Union project is. Again and again, one hears the comment that the great unwashed should not be allowed to vote on issues which they are incapable of understanding. This reaction is not new: ruling classes for centuries have loathed democracy, which is seen as an existential threat to the wealth and privileges of the elite.
- Brexit and the new hostility to participatory democracy
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The reaction to Brexit illustrates the desperate need for the Left to return to first principles. For, as the result broke on social media, a remarkable number of progressives directed their anger not at anti-immigrant demagogues and opportunist politicians but against the voters themselves and the very idea of a referendum in which they might express their will. It's merely the most recent illustration of a growing estrangement from democracy, not only on the mainstream Right but also on the Left.
- Brexit: the British Working Class has Just Yawned Awake
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The referendum has engaged all kinds of people who were politically indifferent 6 months ago.
- Britain, Europe and the Real Crisis
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The decision by British voters last week to leave the European Union has brutally exposed two features of contemporary British politics. The first is the depth of popular disaffection with mainstream political institutions. The second is the paralysis of the political class in the face of this disaffection.
The Brexit victory was buttressed by a coalition of disparate social groups. Traditional Conservative supporters in the shires and the suburbs have long been suspicious of the European project. Few were surprised that they voted in large numbers against EU membership. What shocked many politicians and pundits about the referendum result was the extent of hostility in traditional Labour Party heartlands, in the North of England, in the Midlands and in the Welsh valleys.
- Building a progressive majority
Left strategy after the Brexit vote
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
After the EU referendum we are seeing both horror at anti-migrant sentiment and pandering to it -- but only a radical economic offer can carve a way through.
- Democracy and Popular Sovereignty instead of Neoliberal Integration and a failed Euro-System
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
This document was commonly developed by people from the Lexit Network. It was written and agreed before the Brexit referendum and was not intended to influence the popular vote one way or another. With the implementation of the European single market and the Maastricht Treaty, European integration was established as a neoliberal project for the long run. The Stability- and Growth Pact, the fundamental freedoms of the single market and the European monetary union, among other elements, constituted a framework that has fueled austerity policies, the dismantling of workers’ rights and the welfare state and imposed privatization throughout the EU member states.
- Democracy was never intended for degenerates
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
This is not a left vs right debate -- today, as a century ago, the anti-democratic impulse comes from both left and right, from both reactionaries and self-defined progressives.
- European Unification Divides Europeans: How Forcing People Together Tears Them Apart
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Unification of Europe has brought about radical new divisions within Europe. The most significant split is between the people and their political leaders.
- How the left should deal with the referendum results
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
With many of the old political certainties breaking up, the left have to rise to the challenge.
- How Western Military Interventions Shaped the Brexit Vote
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Michael Hudson argues that military interventions in the Middle East created refugee streams to Europe that were in turn used by the anti-immigrant right to stir up xenophobia.
- In or out of the European Union? A tale of two referenda
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Andrew Burgin argues for a 'Remain' vote in the Brexit referendum.
- The internationalist case against the European Union
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
For the first time in a generation Britain will vote on its membership of the European Union. How to vote in that referendum is a difficult choice for anyone on the left. Since the 1990s the anti-EU camp has been dominated by the chauvinist and racist right, initially on the Thatcherite wing of the Tory party, but now enjoying separate and increasingly powerful representation in the shape of the UK Independence Party. But anyone who contemplates therefore voting Yes in the referendum is confronted with the reality of the EU as a neoliberal club currently busy nailing the people of Greece to the cross of austerity.
- The Left and the EU
Why Cling to This Reactionary Institution?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Why is it that many people who consider themselves left-wing have such difficulty grasping that the EU is a deeply reactionary institution? The mere fact that those running the EU present it as an internationalist venture dedicated to the creation of a world free of nationalist enmities does not make it so. If we want to examine the EU in its proper light, then we should ignore the high-flown rhetoric in which its supporters indulge, and consider its actual record. And what is the record of the EU, once we penetrate the obfuscatory rhetoric about ‘internationalism’ that surrounds EU policy? Without a doubt, that record is one that should cause those on the left now defending it acute embarrassment, as it starkly contradicts the ideals that the left has always claimed to uphold.
- An Open Letter to the British Left
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Dear friends and comrades, To a foreigner who has been living and working in the United Kingdom for the last sixteen years, the immediate post-referendum situation appears highly paradoxical. It seems as if the shock has been of such a magnitude that even the most celebrated British virtues -- sense of humour, understatement and, above all, solid common sense -- have faded away.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 2, 2016
Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, and Contempt for Democracy
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Brexit, the British vote to leave the European Union, has thrown the political elites into turmoil and confusion. The referendum was supposed to be a safe political manoeuvre, a way to produce an appearance of democratic legitimacy for the profoundly undemocratic structures of the EU. The gambit turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation, as millions of people turned out to express their opposition to a state of affairs that is leaving the majority worse off while enriching a small minority. This issue of Other Voices looks at the Brexit referendum, elite loathing for democracy, and the related attempt to get rid of Labour's leftwing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
- A Plague of Rats: How Years of Austerity Prompted Many Britons to Vote for Brexit
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2019
Many Britons in poor areas voted for Brexit even though they benefited financially from the EU. Though often blamed on fear of immigration it is also a result of discontent brought on by severe austerity and privatization.
- The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened
If you believe there's such a thing as "too much democracy," you probably don't believe in democracy at all
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
"This isn't democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics," Kenneth Rogoff recently wrote in the 'Boston Globe,' of last week's Brexit vote.
- The Revolt of the Fragments
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
It was, without question, a bloody nose for the political establishment, the biggest it has received for decades. And many have read the unexpected success of the Leave camp in the British EU referendum straightforwardly as a revolt against the political class and as a victory for democracy. Yes, it was a revolt against the political class in London and in Brussels. But the referendum result was also far more complicated than that.
- The Silence of the Left: Brexit, Euro-Austerity and the T-TIP
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The media in the United States have treated the British vote against remaining in the European Union (EU) as if it is populist “Trumpism,” an inarticulate right-wing vote out of ignorance at being left behind by the neoliberal economic growth policy. What is left out of this picture is that there is a sound logic to oppose membership in the EU.
- "Small really is beautiful", claims new report on England's farming
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
A report on the benefits of small-scale farming practices in England, arguing that land size should not be used to exclude farms from receiving subsidies.
- Some Pundits Think the Solution to Right-Wing Populism Is Less Democracy
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The core orthodoxies of neoliberalism are under attack by populist forces, and commentators are scrambling for a response. Some are suggesting more left-wing red meat. Others, a moment of self-reflection. But a number of pundits are doing that most noxious of political commentary pastimes -- equating right and left responses to the failures of globalization and advocating that "elites" should fight back against the forces of inconvenient democracy.
- Sound & Fury
Just What Does Brexit Signify?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Not since Y2K thretened to plunge the planet into chaos has a story provoked overwrought handwringing comparable to that triggered by Britons voting to withdraw from the European Union. By common assessment, Brexit signifies something profound. History itself has seemingly gone off the rails. Darkness threatens to cover the earth.
- This vote was about far more than immigration
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The vote to leave the EU was fuelled by class divisions, argues Alastair Stephens.
- UK after the rain
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Shabbir Lakha looks beyond the media blizzard surrounding last week's referendum result and identifies anti-racist work as a campaigning imperative.
- Was Brexit a Working-Class Revolt?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The malevelant genius of the Leave campaign was that it managed to go one step further and direct the anger of many previous working-class targets of derision at the even more vulnerable immigrants.
- Why They Left
Brexit wasn't the first time Europeans rejected the EU, and it won't be the last. Here's what the Left should do.
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The Leave victory in the British referendum represents a moment of political confusion -- a hiatus in the opposition between social classes. No class appears capable of directing events. The ruling class has no clear plans for the future, and seems temporarily stunned.
- Why we voted leave: voices from northern England - documentary
Resource Type: Film/Video
Published: 2016
A short look at why those in the north of England mainly voted to leave the EU - from Guerrera Films.
- Your EU vote is crucial because it won't count
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Here is a prediction about the outcome of today’s UK referendum on leaving the European Union. Even in the unlikely event that the remain camp loses, the UK will still not Brexit. Europe's neoliberal elite will not agree to release its grip on a major western nation. A solution will be found to keep the UK in the union, whatever British voters decide. Which is one very good reason to vote Brexit.
|
AlterLinks
© 2021.
|