Performative radicalism that freaks out wider society instead of slow steady progress has led to the near complete irrelevance of the left in the west, especially the anglosphere. I mean, UK Labor is a centrist pro-capital party now. It's over.
Someone somewhere has to work for things to happen.
To me it feels like when a parasite finds a weak host. Neither will survive long. The relationship can be symbiotic but that requires effort as well as conscientiousness on both sides. The place was not running at break even but they wanted more despite that. They wouldn’t even accept cuts in staffing… They bled it to death with idealism.
Given the right priorities, it can work. A business can be profitable, and also embody progressive principles. It can be both an income, and socially responsible.
But most businesses fail. 90% or so don't survive 5 years. That's before adding externalities.
So starting a business with goals orthogonal to successful business is twice as hard.
I was struck by the demand by employees to be a collective. Thats an unusual request. It suggests that, even hired, that was floated as a path. It suggests the owner wanted employees to be "part of the family". So suddenly getting decisions from on high was jarring for them.
Unionising is a strange response. (Even the union was surprised.) Frankly the writing was on the wall at that point. A more experienced business person would just have closed then and there.
Obviously the employees thought that they could have succeeded had they just got the stock for free. I suspect not. They wanted more pay, would have had no incoming monthly investment, and would be short at least 1 worker (enough was likely doing a lot of work.) Doesn't sound like a solid business plan to me.
So yes, idealism is fine, but it doesn't make the business work. And I agree, in this case it killed it. But frankly, starting a bookshop these days is a pretty doomed approach. A (good) coffee shop (with some books) may have had a chance.
Well, the "right", or more aptly conservatives, actively resist change in culture and society. They conserve it (hence the name).
Just like it's not communism to advocate for better welfare, labor rights, affordable housing and so on.
And european mainstream right is no longer right for the last few decades on those topics. Today’s „far“ right sound like what mainstream right would say 10-20-30 years ago depending on exact country.
You said it yourself - even the right used to tolerate illegal immigration. But you were okay voting the center right at that time. And now you're voting the far right who are putting them in concentration camps. So you're far right, but you didn't used to be.
Here „far“ right offer is to deport illegals and curb new migration.
Also, we have detention centers since forever. What do you propose to do with illegal migrants waiting deportations instead? Put them in prisons? That's a wee to harsh, isn't it?
Of course, then people can start talking BS about muh concentration camps with allusions to soviet and nazi camps. But those camps had some specific features that ain't present in detention centers.
The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on conservatism is exactly what I mean:
> Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.
By promoting the incumbent ideas, there's no chance that they "freak(s) out wider society" as the OP said. The ideology is simply to resist change, which will almost always be less controversial than advocating for change.
B) The far right has a lot of wealthy donors because it is safe for capital. In this case, I think money would have smoothed over most of the issues.
Trump won, partly by saying the War on Terror was a disaster and the Republicans were disasters. He distanced himself from a right wing which had done the same thing, made itself irrelevant to the mainstream with performative patriotism while we actually lost lives and trillions of dollars in a quagmire people didn't want about 1-2 years into it.
Whoever brings the left back will have to distance themselves from the party in a similar way
The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you.
Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals.
I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.
Both her and the dock workers were pretty effective in their causes because they have experienced first-hand how going for an half-assed or whimsical approach even in everyday politics bites you hard.
[1]Also wikipedia says that her mother was a house cleaner and school bus driver?
It got powerful because millionaire CEO sponsored them, due to them loving the idea of techno feudalism. And by being enabled by those who said "ignore them they are just trolls". And by support from Russia.
UK Labour has been a "centrist, pro-capital party" for probably your entire life (or at least most of it.) The only reason Corbyn even ended up in front is that a bunch of centrists nominated him as a joke candidate, and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed Miliband had changed the voting rules and accidentally made Labour a democratic party. Of course the membership voted for Corbyn, everybody else was garbage.
Same reason why Trump won the Republican primary in the US - the Tea Party had forced the voting process to be democratic. Unlike the Democratic party, which doesn't even have a vaguely democratic process, culminating in them having absolutely no process in the last election. I still insist that if Sanders had run as a Republican in 2016, he would have been president.
It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.
I don’t think I blame BT for not wanting to invest in a market it was barred from making a profit in. This is the result of heavy handed local regulation strangling a national incumbent for the sake of foreign interests.
At any point other competitors could have made the same investment but didn’t want to either until relatively recently.
Great line.
I think it's fair to say that both conservatives and labour have simply been riding on Margaret Thatchers coattails for the last 3 decades. If any of them have come up with any great original ideas of their own i haven't noticed.
On the subject of democracy it has been very inconvenient recently for both parties. This is where kier starmer comes shining through. In every other area he's bumbling, indecisive and unambitious to name just a few of his traits. But when it comes to maintaining control of his party he's masterful (well, uncharacteristically competent anyway) . He took full advantage of his opposition years to purge the Corbynites from his party. He had the time, it's not like he was doing much opposition. He recently took advantage of a scandal to rid himself of his more leftist and popular deputy Angela Rayner and did a cabinet reshuffle, buying himself more time.
It's noteworthy that the only single occasion that he took any firm and decisive action was in suppressing the right wing riots and prosecuting all the instigators in a truly impressive display of efficiency from the law enforcement and judiciary.
I agree with your analysis of the Democrats. It's hard to manufacture consensus while ignoring your electorate. Especially when you have such an outspoken rival like trump. Starmers opposition is so pathetically bad that he looks ok by comparison.
Anyway what sunk corbyn wasn't his anti semitism, that was the excuse, but his socialism, which isn't at all what New Labour is about. Starmer is a centrist, which stems from his policy of having no position on anything. He is rightfully mistrustful of the left wing of his party. They would have lost in the elections.
Look at UKIP, blaming the cluster fuck of the Brittish economy on immigrants, who are weak, other and easy to blame for damage caused by making taxpayers pay for banker's misfortune and Brexit
I am in New Zealand and we have the same problems, on the left and the right.
Quite obvious what I mean