Rescuing Democracy by Reviving Socialism
A Conversation at the Edinburgh Book Festival, August 20, 2018
Rescuing democracy from autocracy has become an world-wide challenge: how to curb the power of corporations and banks; and the parallel fights for education, housing and health, and the resistance against privatization across Europe and the Americas. And how to stem the tide of right wing movements be they in the US, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary and too many other places.
Familiar names show up in an effort to create a cross border countervailing movement to support democracy and rescue the values and traditions of socialism as countervailing force to capitalism.
Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist, academic and politician. He was a Syriza member of the Hellenic Parliament and served as the Greek Minister of Finance from January to July 2015. In February 2016, he co-founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), and subsequently backed a Remain in the European Union vote in the UK’s Brexit referendum of 2016.
Jeremy Corbyn is a leader of the British Labour Party and of the Opposition in Parliament since 2015. He identifies as a democratic socialist. Corbyn advocates reversing austerity cuts to public services and welfare funding made since 2010; and proposes to undo the privatization of public utilities and the railways. He supports non-interventionism and unilateral nuclear disarmament.
In the snap 2017 general election, Labour (under Corbyn) again finished as the second largest party in parliament, and increased their share of the popular vote to 40%. That increase in vote share was the largest in a single general election since 1945.
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