Carnival of Socialism no. 30: Socialism and Modern Liberty
So, the website was down during the weekend and last night, when I came home from school, I was just exhausted. 
My apologies go, therefore, to the organisers of the Carnival of Socialism, which I was meant to host on Sunday. This is a bit late, but hopefully not the lesser for it, so let’s begin. There have been some great, purpose written, contributions.
I chose the theme of Socialism and Modern Liberty, to honour the convention that happened in London on Saturday. Miljenko speaks of the need for freedoms from, as well as freedoms to. Isaiah Berlin strikes again. Don Paskini, with an activists eye for the grassroots, puts modern liberty into perspective, declaring that whatever New Labour may have done, Britain is not a police state – and the view that it is, serves the enemies of real liberty.
Paul Cotterill links up with the Don to discuss the liberty that is free movement between nations and a free right of abode. Paul draws a convincing parallel between how we treat potential immigrants today with the Victorian notion of the undeserving poor. I would go a step further and say that Western civilisation still hasn’t shaken off the chains of “white man’s burden” – and we should be asking whom these ideas benefit.
I would contend that it’s not the average working person, though they are often held up as the champion of what it is to be British, against the invading hordes of foreigners. We’ll dance that particular pas de deux when I have the time to write at length, however.
Other examples of liberties being taken are forth coming from The Third Estate: the right to eat what we want for lunch. Apparently the government are to publish guidelines as to what public services should serve in their canteens etc. Phrased in such a way, it’s obvious that our liberties are being taken – but we should beware the initiatives we don’t yet have a popular language to critique.
Going off topic for a bit, some other interesting links: the uniting of Gaia wank (sorry Greens!) with class struggle over at Green Left Infoasis; but some Greens are attempting to kill off the word socialism – using arguments which are as old as Maoism and Stalinism. And for once the Daily Kos actually dons some radical clothes with “Incrementalism and the trajectory of history.“
There’ll be a lot more on some of these topics when I actually get ten minutes in a row to write something coherent!
Cool – I’ll let people know – don’t worry about being a little late, not a problem
Gah, missed it! Sorry…
Well done on pulling this togethe Dave.
As for your comment on my offering – bleedin’ typical that you should pick up on the point on which I had a couple of paragraphs in my head but discarded as I was running out of writing time. I wanted to follow on my reference to German unification as an example of where popular sentiment overrode other issues and allowed the West to take an economic hit to make it happen, by looking at (in the context of my general appeal to a renewed spirit of a universal Englightenment (aka Habermasian project as per usual), it would be good to look back to the time of the Enlightenment, to a time before the rise of modern capitlalism, to when the British in India had a genuine respect for Indian culture. That, I wanted to argue, might better serve as our model for a renewed commitment to universal liberty (incl mobility of people), than trying to squash the ‘immigration question’ into a cultural box too small for it.
But I didn’t, and I’m happy to have you write about it instead, though you may use different terms and examples). Is that the pas de deux started?
Many thanks, Dave, for pulling that together. An interesting range of sites and approaches. This needs to happen more often, be bigger and get more publicised. A useful tool indeed.
Many thanks for putting this together, and for giving us a little shout out.