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A candidate for major office with policies that appeal to the most progressive elements of the political left who is also the safe choice for so-called centrist strategic voters is kind of like a unicorn. It seems like Ontario may have found their unicorn in provincial NDP leader Andrea Horwath.

According to a recent poll by Maclean’s and Pollara, Horwath and her party are in second place with 30% support. They trail frontrunner Doug Ford whose “Progressive” Conservatives are leading with 40% support, but are beating incumbent premier Kathleen Wynn whose Liberals are down to 23% support.

The writing is on the wall, or rather on everyone’s screens. Wynne can’t win. If you want to stop Ford Nation from taking over Queen’s Park, you have to vote NDP. Even right-leaning media are admitting Horwath won the first leaders’ debate.

Strategy Meets Solid Progressive Policy

So Horwath is the practical choice for those who don’t want to deal with a Ford at the provincial level. But what about those who see the Liberals as only a slightly less spiteful and ridiculous option than Doug?

Well, last time around, the NDP, under the same leader, desperately tried to position themselves as a watered-down version of the Liberals, to the chagrin of the party faithful. Now, the official ONDP Twitter account is posting stuff like this:

But they’re backing up the sassy tweets with a truly progressive platform that prioritizes universal dental and pharmacare, re-nationalizing Hydro One, turning student loans into grants, improving care for seniors by ending “hallway medicine” and raising taxes on the wealthiest people and corporations. Solid old-school NDP policies all, but the spin they put on some of them is just brilliant.

Bringing Hydro One “back into public hands” is coupled with an estimated 30% reduction in Hydro bills. Meanwhile, “creating thousands of student jobs” is the addendum to their plan to subsidize tuition.

But the best messaging, hands down, has got to be this:

“Protect middle class families by having the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations pay their fair share.”

They have successfully found a way to pitch a longstanding socialist solution to economic inequality as an appeal to the most coveted demographic for so-called moderates, the middle class.

More Left Through School and Weed

Another poll, this one by Forum Research, predicted a PC majority with the NDP as a “strong” Official Opposition. Since it doesn’t really matter how strong the opposition is in a Majority Government, the ONDP need to find a way to do just a bit better than predicted and overtake Ford or at least hold him to a Minority Government.

The only way for them to do that is to keep doing what they’ve been doing, just push a bit further. This is not the time to retreat back into old ways. Playing it safe, this time, means pushing the envelope more.

Horwath has her party’s traditional base back. Now she needs to mobilize new voters and get them excited enough not just to cast their ballot but to volunteer as well.

Proposing free tuition would be one way to do it. They could even announce how they plan to pay for it: with weed.

Seriously, I’m not kidding. Bear with me for a moment.

When cannabis becomes legal in Canada, Wynn plans to tightly control it through the LCBO. Ford, meanwhile, wants a free market, something that has garnered him support on the left.

The ONDP has remained pretty much silent on the subject and I understand why. Wynne’s position is extremely unpopular, especially among NDP supporters, but championing the free market just seems so un-NDP.

But in this case there is a third way. Have the government run medicinal marijuana and cover it as part of pharmacare but open up recreational pot sales to any business that successfully applies for a permit.

The government can regulate the product for quality and ensure proper labour standards and at the same time get a chunk of sales tax from all the places selling it, way more than they would from the mere handful of stores Wynn wants. Then they use the new revenues to pay for post-secondary education.

The spin is simple:

Wynn wants to privatize essential services like hydro and nationalize recreational products like pot with a plan that will make it unprofitable for Ontarians. Ford wants the Wild West. We see this as an opportunity to improve Ontario’s economy and provide a free education for all Ontarians.

It’s just one idea, but I’d hate to see the most left-leaning party that has a chance blow it and lose to Doug Ford over weed. The ONDP should really have a position on this issue which is currently wooing potential future hardcore supporters far to the right.

No matter what they decide to do on this front, though, Ontario New Democrats need to remember that their path to victory is keeping their traditional base and inspiring a new base with bold progressive and unabashedly socialist policy, pitching it in a way that doesn’t terrify suburbia, and driving the point home that Wynne can’t win and the only way to keep Ford Nation and all of their regressive social policies out of Queen’s Park is to vote NDP.

A unicorn is special because it’s a unicorn. If it tries to pretend it’s just a horse, then it loses any advantage it had.

* Featured image by E.K. Park via WikiMedia Commons

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As night fell in France, sighs of relief resonated through the French political class. The “Republican Front”– put together by the center-right and center-left coalitions — had saved the day.

Not more than a few minutes after the results filtered in and after the last fateful prayers were made, pundits both from the left and the right were quick to claim credit for the magical solution that had salvaged French democracy and French republicanism from the totalitarian threat of the Front National.  A cacophony then ensued, a mix of apologies made by the French political elite, a promise to change fundamentally the way things were done and politics in general, while at the same time offering no clues whatsoever to how that might be done.

One of the crispiest mea culpas of the night came from none other than Emmanuel Valls, the current socialist prime minister of France. In his allocation he said, as he has said at every occasion in the past week, that “there would be a radical change in French politics and especially within the Socialist Party.” The question that must be asked is what change does “change” entail?

Front National leader Marie Le Pen (image: Al Jazeera)
Front National leader Marie Le Pen (image: Al Jazeera)

Looking at the past decade of French politics, from Chirac to the 2007 election that put Sarkozy in l’Élysée to the Valls government, the difference in policy between the three governments, between “center-right” and “center-left” are almost indistinguishable. The past 15 years of French political life has been dominated by the securitarian psychosis.

Securitarinism is a socio-pyschological defense mechanism that uses the façade of security to hide a deep sectarian withdrawal that has been occurring within the prominently white de-industrialized communities of France. The withdrawal is a direct consequence of the disorientation that successive brutal reforms, carried out by both the political left and the political right, have caused. They have eroded the neuralgic center and the symbolic cartography that French working class communities had of themselves and their immediate environment.

There’s a startling correlation between the topology of the deindustrialization processes and the topology of the growth of the FN vote share. The French northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais is the prefect example of this distressing pattern. Once a working-class bastion of the French left with traditionally strong workers movements, it was hit hard by the French industrial down-turn and outsourcing. Today, it is the region where the FN has seen its most spectacular implementation.

The sectarian withdrawal that has occurred in many traditional working class communities in France isn’t solely the result of the economic downturn or of economic ultra-liberalism, although they are among the main causes. Another primordial reason is the implosion of traditional left-wing mass organizations and their mutation into agents of the same securitarian tradition, embracing an ultra-liberal and neoconservative unorthodox agenda, a conglomeration of all political stripes into a unified thread of the extreme-center.

The securitarian trend has been embodied by pretty much every single minister of the interior, the equivalent of our Minister of Public Safety, for the past few decades. This securitarian drive has taken control over every aspect of French political life.

In fact both ex-President Sarkozy and the current prime minister Valls, one a nominal socialist and the other nominally an ultra-liberal conservative, both used their passage through the hallways of the French ministry of the interior as launchpads for their ascendant political careers. Valls in many ways emulated the “Sarkozy blueprint” of being an overtly outspoken and outlandish minister of the interior as way to fast track his political stardom.

The state of emergency that has been imposed on France since the attacks of last month is yet another chapter of the securitarian regime. It has completely taken control of the entire French apparatus, an apparatus that was already predisposed to stifle any form of dissidence.

In reaction to the uber-militarization of French society, the fabrication of a perpetual state of war by the French political elites and the deconstruction of all the societal structures at the foundation of the French republican experiment, the right-wing FN appealed to the most sectarian impulses of the most marginalized and impoverished sections of the French population. Where left-wing movements are no more, a frenzied populism, a forced marriage between a rampant xenophobic rhetoric of economical nationalism and anti-liberalism and desultory social Keynesian economical theory, has filled the void.

For the past few decades the French republican experience has been missing in action. Last night after the ecstatic champagne flow, the final ce n’est qu’un aurevoir of a moribund elite, dried out Marianne, the allegory of the values of French Republic could still be heard cringing. The mortal blow that the FN was supposed to have dealt to her bosom didn’t occur; only for her defenders to stab her in the back, while they murmured the words: égalité, liberté, fraternité!

* Featured image: Xavier Bertrand of the center-right Les Republicains speaks after defeating National Front leader Marine Le Pen in northern France’s Nord-Pas-de-Calais (source: ibtimes)

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Not more than 24 hours ago was I here writing up a summary of the pivotal talks for the future of the Eurozone that are taking place in Brussels and now everything, or almost everything, has changed.

In the last day of almost non-stop negotiations, a already humiliated Tsipras has been dragged through the mud in an unbearable and horrendous manner. The Germans, believe it or not, have towed a harder line, completely redefining the notion of intransigence altogether, refusing and shutting down Greek propositions and pushing for harsher measures and lighting bolt reforms. Tsipras and his team of advisors went through what was dubbed by observers as a session of “mental waterboarding,” a preview of what might be in the works for the Greek people within the days to come.

The German Grexit

The most amazing turn of events was that, finally, Germany’s hidden agenda for a Greek exit from the Eurozone has surfaced in one of the four draft propositions that circulated on social media and throughout the mainstream media during the talks that lasted for a record 17 hours. The German will to precipitate and encourage the Grexit outcome is telling. The German government wants to send a strong signal and it’s nothing “personal.” It has more to do with the anti-austerity movements that are brewing throughout Europe, and not just in Greece.

Surely the German position wasn’t improvised and, unlike some have said, Merkel and her administration are not being irrational. The Germans, politicians and public, aren’t suffering from some sort of PTSD acquired during the hyperinflation crisis of the 1930s or an incommensurable will to humiliate and trample Greece. (This has been accomplished ten fold over the past five years) They are very much conscious of their program and nonchalant about its application.

Make no mistakes. This will be the Versailles Treaty of the Eurozone.

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100,000 people protest against the austerity measures in front of parliament building in Athens (29 May 2011). From Wikipedia.

Restructuring of the Greek State Instead of the Greek Debt

The German program, the austerity program put forward by the German delegation among others, has one essential objective: to put the Greek people under guardianship by nullifying their voting system. The Eurogroup’s end isn’t merely to humiliate Greece, but to restructure the Greek state from the top down, leaving it devoid of any input from its own citizens.

But this restructuring goes further. The Eurogroup, which seemed to be on the defensive after the victory of the #OXI (isn’t that a far away memory?), is now demanding that Greece privatize 50 billion euros in public assets. The Greek state must become an empty shell. First, the utilities markets will have to be liberalized. But 50 billion euros means much more than an austerity-lite. The propositions the Eurogroup have put on the table call for the complete dismantlement of the Greek state and the transfer of its assets into the hands of third party management – technically a bank would run the bulk of Greece if this proposition goes through.

“There is no alternative”

The program put forward by Team Austerity is more than just the economical restructuring of Greece, it’s a way to cleanse Greek of its socialistic tendencies and of the “democratic mistake” of SYRIZA.

In a Europe where Socialist parties are the shadows of their former selves, at best lending a human face for austerity measures and at worst selling out their “working-class” constituency to legitimize deeper cuts. SYRIZA had been the first major threat against the neoliberal hegemony to have surfaced on European soil within decades, since the election of François Mitterrand in the 1980s and the implementation of the Programme Commun – which also resulted in utter failure. The neoliberal discourse has, within the past years, been shaken to its core and radical left-wing oppositions have appeared as an alternative. The German position reaffirms what Thatcher had said a few decades ago: “there is no alternative.” What German intransigence means, more than anything else, is that the reform approach of social-democratic governments with the current rapport of forces and within the Eurozone is unrealistic and has proven to be an impossible mission.

No to austerity
Anti-austerity demo in Edinburgh. 14 Feb, 2015. Photo by Digi Tailwag. Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0.

The Lineage of a New Absolutist Supranational Entity

The German proposition is using Greece to shift the current dynamic within the Eurozone. Within the past two decades, European federalism has been refused most notably in the referendum of 2005, in which both the French and Dutch electorates voted against the proposed European Constitution, thereby refusing federalism. Today, the technocratic federalism, which was rejected by the electorates in the past, is making its comeback in an astonishing way, through austerity. The dynamic of “economic integration,” the implementation of a common currency and of a common free trade zone has come to trump the democratic procedures of most member states. If this deal goes through, it’s not just Greece that must be worried, but every small European member state that has a sizeable amount of debt.

Thus the lineages of a new form of absolutist state have been formed – a state that is technically independent, but in reality completely subdued to the will of unelected lenders, bankers, and technocrats. Could it be that Greece, the cradle of western democracy, is also set to be it’s gravesite? Only time will tell.

What is to be Done?

For left-wing movements, there are many more questions than answers that arise as the final outline of yet another humiliating deal for Greece is drawn. How can there be a break with the Eurozone? How must we reform the European Union and European institutions? Is reforming this corrupt system even possible?

But most importantly, as the conversations draw to a close in Brussels, there are three points to be made about the future and the survival of socialist and social-democratic movements that refute the neoliberal stranglehold and want to challenge it:

First, Oxi, a “No” against savage neoliberalism and barbaric liberalization and privatization is possible. Sections of European society, public service workers, the youth, the unemployed, the underemployed, migrant workers, the service class and the working class are ready to be mobilized. We must take the necessary lessons from the Greek referendum and implement them broadly.

Second, the reaction against the Greek Oxi vote was international. A globalized reaction can only be met with a globalized revolt. European anti-austerity movements must organize in a transnational manner and create strong and enduring alliances amongst each other. Actions must be coordinated simultaneously. In other words, international general strikes and transnational movements must foster a strong consortium of action.

Third, we must be ready to break – but that is easier said than done. What a break means and how it is to be achieved are the primordial questions. These questions do not seem to have been drawn up on the SYRIZA planning board. The drawing of this solution might make us question the entirety of our strategic and our tactical outlook. One thing is certain, this new solution must be drawn within the context of incredible financial pressure and blackmail. Grexit or not, default or not, that will remain the case.

A luta continua.

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A specter is haunting democracies throughout the world. A barely visible cloud, an entangling nebula is settling in throughout large swaths of modern political rhetoric. Many pundits and opportunistic spokespeople are saying that the Ghost of Ideology from days long past is speaking from beyond the grave, and that it has resurrected and is walking among us again.

But, surely the question we must ask ourselves is, “Did ideology ever die in the first place?”

Ideology — as a word — is used for the most diverse purposes nowadays. It can mean almost anything in the current state of world affairs. Ideology is seen as the equivalent of a political agenda or religious dogma; thus, the religious extremism of ISIS and the “neo-fascistoid” elements of Greece’s Golden Dawn or  France’s Front Nationale become conflated. Ideology has also become individualised; ideology is not a systemic development anymore, but rather a personal one. Individuals can build their own ideologies.

On the other hand, we apparently live in a “non-ideological” world. Modern day apostles have announced, in a very Nietzschean manner, “Ideology is dead”.
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At the same time, ideology has been “democratized” to the extent that it doesn’t mean anything anymore and has been declared irrelevant in the context of the advent of a non-ideological world.

Ideology can only be understood as a system of symbolic representations. It is, first and foremost, the articulation of a world-view through symbols. For instance, the current dominant global ideology of neo-liberalism uses growth, free trade, free markets, free enterprise and representative democracy as its symbols.

For many contemporary commentators, ideology was buried under the ruins of the devastation it created. From this vantage point, the death of ideology marked the end of a century of ideological struggles, which brought about war, famine and misery to most of mankind. The bi-ideological, and bipolar struggle that defined the Cold War is over. Capitalism is triumphant, all is well, ideology is dead, good night and good luck!

President Bush and President Gorbachev

But it is exactly when you think that you are roaming through the desert of ideology, exactly when the absence of ideology is supposedly self-evident, that is exactly when you’re submerged in ideology. You’re in the thick of it and can’t get out.

In his most recent public interview broadcasted on French national television 2 weeks ago, Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed his intention of reentering the French political scene. During the one hour interview Sarkozy made the case for a new “non-ideological” political movement that would move beyond the drawn fault line of left versus right. For Sarkozy, the main problem with the current Socialist regime was its ideological stance. I couldn’t disagree more. If anything, with the nomination of Manuel Valls as prime minister and his relentless grab for power, the Socialist government has proven that they too abide to this logic of a so-called non-ideological stance.

The problem with this discourse is that ideology, far from having disappeared from the French political scene, has, within the past few years, reinvigorated itself and has become so omnipresent that it now appears to be invisible, even non-existent. And this, because the majority of the French population has internalized the dominant ideology of austerity as being the ultimate truth — as has the majority of human beings on this planet.

In reality a non-ideological stance doesn’t exist. The political project to move beyond the ideological dichotomies of left versus right, of liberalism versus socialism — in the economical sense — doesn’t amount to anything more than a mirage of wishful thinking. Sarkozy is ideology at its purest form.

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Protesters against austerity in France

The left — read here socialists — might have abandoned their ideological attire, but this doesn’t mean they aren’t ideological. In many ways socialist parties throughout the European Union have shedded their social vision and have become another one of those -isms without a suitable prefix. Within this new political dimension of fluid -isms, the driving force is the market and the free circulation of capital, better known as austerity. Differences are non-existent, but one ideology clearly reigns all mighty.

This abandonment of ideology by left-wing movements has allowed extreme-right movements to fill in the void and appear as alternatives. The story is the same throughout Europe, but also with the Tea Party in the US, the Reformists here in Canada, and Modi in India. These neo-nationalist and neo-liberal movements may take various forms, specific to the context to which they belong, but their raison d’être is the same, to fill in an ideological void.

Sarkozy can proudly parade his “non-ideological” message, and he will encounter no dignified opposition, because the ideologically left-wing alternative is dead — if it isn’t dead, then it’s in tatters. From the ruins of this ideological surrender, we must strive to rebuild an alternative dialectic; the ontological survival of the “Left” depends on it. The battle against neo-liberalism and the rise of neo-fascism is, first and foremost, a direct assault on their symbolic mobilizers: The key words, like growth and jobs, that are at its symbolic foundation. Only though this deconstruction can come the construction of a true alternative. Now, more than ever, it is imperative that an alternative ideology be built from the ideological ruins of the Left’s upcoming self-destruction.

A luta continua.

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It was 00:20 April the 25th of 1974, when a bunch of rebellious young captains, armed with a bunch of antiquated weapons, driving some outfitted, broken-down armored vehicles and unorganized novice recruits, announced through the beautiful hymn of Portuguese resistance Grandola Villa Morena the end of the longest dictatorship on European soil.

This past Friday marked the 40th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, and yet, in many ways, while 40 years might have past, the events of April 1974 and the revolutionary agitation that continued until November of 1975 are more relevant today than any time since. The memory of these past events longs for new revolutionaries to continue planting the carnations of the past in the bleak austere Portugal of today.

And if this article of mine today has any objective, it is to debunk the myths revolving around this revolution of April that grow like bad weeds threatening the very livelihood of the carnations that we have so carefully gardened since. In many ways the carnations of that red April, the ideals and principals of April 74, are on a lifeline in Portugal. Some would say that everything is on a lifeline in Portugal and they would be right, but some things more than others.

portugal protest 2014
Student protest in Portugal April 2, 2014 (image: newstimes.com)

The outburst of popular joy, the scenes of immense happiness, relief that better days were to come, relief that no young Portuguese would have to fight in the wars of colonial aggression were implanted in the Portuguese common psyche in 74-75. It is very significant that this year those images were mirrored in a very different way during the commemorations of the 40th anniversary. In many ways, scenes of happiness and joy became promises of renewed resistance, a heartfelt commitment to bring the ideals of 1974, the movement of thousands of unionists, of anti-fascist militants, communists and socialists, back to the forefront of the political struggle in a political arena that has be dormant for too long.

Every revolution breeds a counter-revolution, thus the tumultuous period that followed created the conditions for the reaction of the 25th of November that put an end once and for all to the revolutionary process that was put in motion on the 25th of April. And this is the first myth that must be dismantled: the 25th of April was not the culminating point of the Carnation Revolution, much to the contrary it was the opening of the flood gates, not the be-all end-all.

But this is a very potent myth indeed. Center-right and right-wing Portuguese political formations have used it to paint the Portuguese uprising of April 74 as yet another liberal, pro-democracy, pro-western revolution. Thus the Carnation Revolution became tied up in the various “velvet revolutions” and the underlying radical ideals and movements that were its true motors were buried, in practice and in memory.

The Portuguese revolution was far from being one of those liberal revolutions that were the by-products of capitalism and whose primary purpose was the liberation of the markets and not the liberation of the people. The Portuguese revolution was in many ways very radical and as its centerpiece was economic justice and economic liberation of the people above all things.

The recurrent myth that the Iberian revolutions against fascism of the 1970s were velvet revolutions is a hoax. The notion of velvet revolutions is a hoax itself, a pretty lie to murder any memory of the struggles of land reform, the occupation of factories, or the setting-up of workers cooperatives and usher in a new story of April 74 that fits within the neoliberal rhetoric of freedom = austerity.

Another myth, menace, a threat that might if enabled to grow freely forever ruin the gardens of April 74, is the notion that the Carnation revolution was exclusively a Portuguese matter. In many ways the Carnation revolution was propelled and invigorated by the revolutions of national liberation that were ablaze in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.

carnations portugal
Carnations held at the 40th anniversary commemoration of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution (image: newstimes.com)

The right wing, fascistic elements in Portugal love to remind us subtly, in not so many words, that not so long ago Portuguese and Angolans were mortal enemies and base their nationalistic populism on a combination of historical hatred and contemporary xenophobia against immigrants. Something that became self-evident to many Portuguese soldiers in the wars of national liberation was that their struggle, the struggle of the Portuguese working class (which obviously made-up the majority of the ranks of Portuguese soldiers in Africa) and that of the Angolans and Mozambicans was the same. The liberation of Portugal went hand in hand with the liberation of all peoples of the Portuguese empire and beyond.

Last but not least is the myth that somehow Portuguese democracy was saved from the most radical fringes of the Carnation Revolution, from the communists and the more left-wing “true” socialists. The mistake made here is a simple one, a misunderstanding of the terms revolution and counter-revolution.

The Carnation revolution is in many ways an unfinished one, because in appearance, on the surface, many things might have seemed to change in Portuguese society in the past 40 years, but in reality the fundamental structure of oppression, of the concentration of wealth and land within the hands of a few continues unchanged. The same that benefited from the structure of the dictatorship are benefiting now from the dictatorship of the Troika.

If Portugal has been in and out of “economic crises” during these past 40 years it’s because of one simple dynamic: the struggle between those that through austerity and neo-liberalism try to re-create the same paradigm that existed under Salazar and the old regime with a democratic façade and those that fight to continue the revolution of April 74. It’s the struggle between the Carnations and the bad-weeds that are trying to strangle the last radicalism of April 74 to death.

From the scenes I noticed yesterday, the faces of people that marched passed-on one significant message to the economic elites, the carnations of April 74 still grow in us! As Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said this experience of “Socialism à la Portugaise” lives on! The antidote to austerity is to keep gardening the Carnations of April 74.

Abril de novo, Abril para sempre!

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It’s that time of the year again, the time for review of the year articles, the top 10s of 2013, the political winners and the political losers. Unfortunately this article is not going to take such a clear cut stance, but it will make reference to one of the most important tends in this past year, the rise of the socialist alternative.

2013 most certainly could go down in the memories of progressives, radicals, rabble-rousers and revolutionaries as just another dull year within an infinite sea of rampant victorious capitalism. Some might say, as always amazing movements were bread in these past 365 days but none of them gave birth to anything of substance.

And such could be said of almost every year since Fukuyama, oracle in chief of the new world order, announced the  end of history. For Fukuyama and the neo-liberal guard, the fall of the wall of Berlin and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc coincided with the ushering in of a new age, a never changing age of relentless growth and prosperity, an age in which any alternative to capitalism was dead in the egg.

From the onset, Fukuyama’s divination seemed quite fragile. It foresaw a utopia on earth, but never answered the question, for whom?

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Was this the end of history? Some think so, but is that changing in 2013?

Certainly since 1989 the rapid growth of global capitalism is due to the erasing of almost every from of regulation: regulation of the financial markets or regulation of trade. In this new world the main enemy is any barrier to the complete freedom of multinationals and corporations.

In pure economic terms there is no doubt that these past decades have been fabulous for the GDP and NASDAQ and all their siblings within the family tree of economic indicators. The wild 90s and 2000s were la belle époque, but not the end of history.

For its proponents and ardent defenders the end of history was not, in any way shape or form, the end of inequality or the dawning of a more just world, quite to the contrary. For those that crafted the doublespeak rhetoric of the end of history, it literally meant that, like it or not, capitalism was here to stay. The only alternative, communism, had crumbled and thus from now on consumerism was a synonym for freedom, capitalism was liberty and inequality was the natural way of things.

On the other hand any “alternative” to the new modus operandi was thrown into the dustbin of history alongside “communism” (insert here Stalinism). Any movement that spoke of a greater redistribution of wealth or fought for the defense of the social welfare state – or as Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it, the right to an adequate standard of living – was trash.

For the neo-liberal elite, the welfare state is seen as the final frontier, a regulation of society at large that must be abolished under current standards. Thus ‘left-wing’ movements, be they social-democratic, socialist or any other alternative tendency, have been struggling for relevance in this new age and some have chosen the path of least resistance and decided to implement the norms and dictates of the end of history, somehow thinking that this would make them relevant again.

Hand in hand with this loss of relevance goes the alienation of many groups in society that have lost for faith in the democratic system in its entirety. A democratic system that offers no substantial alternative breeds in itself disaffection and apathy, slow is the death of democracy as we know it.

Michelle Bachelet during the most recent presidential election in Chile
Michelle Bachelet during the most recent presidential election in Chile

And yet the 2008 crisis has planted the seeds of something new. The world has been rocked by popular discontent voiced in different ways, in very different parts of the globe. And the year 2013 was no different with continued uprisings in Europe against austerity –the dismantling of the welfare state through brutal “structural adjustments”– uprisings in Turkey against the privatization of public spaces, here in Canada protests, led by First Nation, Inuit and Metis communities, erupted against environmental degradation for short-term profit.

But most importantly, 2013 was a year in which many struggles gained concrete victories amidst great aversion.

In Chile, Camila Vallejo, Gabriel Boric, Giorgio Jackson and Karol Cariola, leaders of the student protests that have rocked the country since 2011, were elected to parliament. Vallejo was elected on a communist ticket and that party, after the last legislative elections, has the biggest percentage of seats since the time of Salvador Allende.

Still in Chile, Michele Bachelet was reelected to the highest position in the country with a whopping 62 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage for a presidential candidate in the history of the Chilean left. Madame Bachelet was elected on a platform to continue to roll back the reforms that were ushered in under the military junta of Pinochet and to implement universal free post-secondary education.

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From Kshama Sawant’s twitter, campaign for 15 dollars minimum wage

One of the greatest victories of 2013 surprisingly had for a backdrop the United States of America. For the first time since the great depression, a major American city elect an openly socialist candidate to office.

Kshama Sawant was elected bringing to the center stage of American politics the struggle for a living wage instead of a minimum wage, rent control and higher taxes for the wealthiest. The victory of her grassroots movement is the embodiment of the Socialist Alternative that in 2013 started to dawn.

In Europe, splinter left-wing groups that offer a true alternative to the neo-liberal status-quo championed by center-center right and center-center left wing political parties are on the rise. Syriza the ‘radical’ left-wing coalition of several left-wing political parties is now given the lead in the polls. Syriza’s leader Alexis Tsipras, has been endorsed by the European left to lead a new anti-austerity coalition in the upcoming European elections.

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Syriza founding congress picture by Eleanna Kounoupa Creative Commens on Flickr

Here in Montreal, Projet Montreal more than doubled its seats in city council and has become, for the first time in history, official opposition. A coalition of progressives from all walks of life and Quebecois left-wing political tendencies has shown the way for left-wing movements to link social movements and grassroots politics to a prominent place on the political spectrum.

For these reasons the year that is now coming to end was a very fruitful one in which the alternative to this current system of savage capitalism grew in an extraordinary manner, and announced the return of history.

For this reason we have much to look forward to in 2014.

A Luta Continua