How does a bastard, orphan, son of a… you get the gist. Jasper sits down with Christian Parenti, author of ‘Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons From a Misunderstood Founder’ (Verso, 2020) to discuss the political and economic legacy of the ten-dollar founding father. Was Hamilton really a free-trading capitalist, or a statist radical? How do Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism continue to influence socio-economic development…
Bertolt Brecht was one of the most innovative and unique cultural products of “the Left”, his work is the product of lived experiences in Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the United States, and the German Democratic Republic. Consequently, Brecht, politically and ideologically, inhabits a distinct space that has many lessons for socialism today. Brecht lived through multiple defeats of socialism in an age…
Credit: UA Archives – Upper Arlington Public Library (Repository: UA Historical Society) I have never considered myself a “sports person”. In my salad days, I hardly brimmed with natural athleticism. To me, school sport was at best an irritant and at worst an exercise in humiliation–I faked injuries in order to do my homework in the library (I know, I know) and declared…
Photo Credit: Rich Grundy In 1792, a British army officer sent to assess the morale of potential troops in an imminent war against revolutionary France reported with horror that the workers of Sheffield did not only ‘read the most violent publications,’ they also ‘comment on them.’ In Halifax, a Methodist chapel had set up a debating society at which the town’s weavers…
“I think we made mistakes in the eighties. With hindsight, I don’t think we helped ourselves. We allowed ourselves to be marginalised; we were too unforgiving of people who some saw as betraying our principles and didn’t give them a way back. My view has always been that if you don’t take the mainstream of the Labour Party with you, you’re going…
Aneurin Bevan is venerated by all parts of the Labour Party, with seemingly every faction and politician casting themselves in his political image. In Welsh Labour, this is taken to the next level: “[Bevan] was mentioned by no less than five different speakers before lunch on the first day of Welsh Labour party conference in 2012”. This quote is taken from a…
There are few things about which I am ardent and zealous and universalist, entirely assured of the cold clear correctness and blanket applicability of my own position. It’s just not the soft left way; that kind of certainty is for tankies and Baptists. There is one cause, however, to which I offer the kind of blind and unquestioning devotion usually reserved for…
Authoritarianism has always shaped how the Labour Party has approached social policy. The New Labour years were defined by ‘tough’ Home Secretaries choosing their next target to deride as anathema to British society; be it professors telling uncomfortable truths about drugs, or asylum seekers having the temerity to exist within our borders. Tony Blair even went so far as to describe Labour’s…
