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There are very few people on the Left who are ready to accept the fact that the Left movement has been facing a crisis of ideology since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and Social Democracy since the 1990s. With the collapse of Social Democracy and the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the Left lost its ideology and its way.

The failure of the Left to develop a new ideology in the last thirty years is the underlying reason for its weakness today. A huge credibility gap exists about socialism and the Left in the minds of the working class. And that is not surprising at all.

The Left failed to respond when its ideology faced a deep crisis in the early 1990s. By then it had become obvious that the Lefts 19th Century socialist ideology had failed when put into practice in the 20th Century.

The collapse of social democracy represented the failure of the reformist wing of the socialist movement. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc (the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) represented the failure of the more radical wing of the socialist movement. These two wings represented the whole socialist project in the eyes of the world's population. The failure of the socialist project raised serious questions on the credibility of the socialist ideology.

Tragically, this momentous defeat was not recognised as such by almost all socialists. And thus, they failed to take the steps needed to reconsider and renew their ideology.

The main challenge before the Left movement was to develop a democratic model of socialism after the failure of the top-down bureaucratic and authoritarian model. But the Left movement failed to develop a democratic model of socialism which guarantees democratic and political rights, freedoms and liberties.

In particular, the Left was unable to see that its old ideology had been missing the vital ingredient of democratic control by the working class. The Lefts emphasis on planning, public ownership and public services had left out the key question of how these institutions were going to be run. How they would be made accountable to their workers, service users, customers etc.

In the absence of any clear programme for participatory democracy in the state and the public sector, these institutions had ended up under the control of bureaucrats or elites. As a result, each attempt at socialist reform or revolution has produced top-down, bureaucratic and inefficient systems. In all the experiments of implementing socialism, there was a common feature the working people were alienated from power.

Experience has shown time and time again that democratic control of society by working people will not emerge automatically. It must be specifically planned for and campaigned on if we are to see it arrive and flourish. Because of this, popular control has to be at the heart of any new democratic socialist ideology for the 21st Century. Not added on as an afterthought. The lack of this is the root cause of the failure of the old socialist ideology.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and right-wing turn of social democracy, socialism was a viable alternative to capitalism. It was part of the political consciousness of the wider layers of working people around the world. Socialism was a credible alternate in the eyes of millions of working and young people. The Left was a credible political force in society.

But todays reality is different. Even though capitalism discredited itself in the eyes of millions of people around the world in the last three decades, the Left has failed to emerge as a viable alternative. Socialism is no more on the agenda and the Left is not a credible political force in society. The Left has been pushed aside since the rise of the neoliberal capitalist ideology.

Millions of young people, workers, unemployed, small traders, farmers, peasants and women are angry with the existing socioeconomic conditions in which they are forced to live in. They wanted to get rid of inequality, poverty, exploitation, alienation and unemployment. The anger against authoritarian neoliberal capitalism is growing in many countries both rich and poor.

Under neoliberal capitalism, there is a growing level of discontent. The decades of austerity, cuts on social spending, privatization, deregulation, pro-market reforms and attacks on the welfare state have fueled anger against neoliberal policies. Life meanwhile gets harder and more uncertain for most of the working class. Thus, increasingly obscene wealth for a shrinking, super-rich minority starkly contrasts with the falling living standards for the rest of the population. Under modern capitalism, each new generation is increasingly worse off than the one before.

In response to these worsening conditions, we see increasing anger and prejudice, political polarization and degenerating public debate. All reflected in the rising racial, ethnic and religious conflicts that sometimes break into civil war. Looming over everything there is the threat of climate change and the wider destruction of our animals, forests and habitat forced on us by the incessant drive for profit.

But the lack of any alternative to capitalism constantly undermines the consciousness of working people and cripples their struggles. Who can really resist an attack when they can't see an alternative or even the hope of success?

Many people asked why the Left has failed to capitalize on the failures of capitalism. The main reason is the failure of the left movement to develop a new ideology of socialism since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and social democracy.

In the absence of a new credible ideology, the Left is badly fractured. Ideology often acts as the glue that holds a movement together. In its absence, the Left is repeatedly torn by disunity constantly sidelined into potentially disunifying struggles such as identity politics, rather than able to integrate such struggles into the central need to create a democratic socialist society.

In society more generally, the collapse of the Lefts old ideology has left a vacuum into which has rushed not only neoliberalism, but nationalism, racism, sectarianism and all sorts of divisive movements.

The writer is a freelance journalist.

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Crisis of the left - The News International

On COVID, ask why

Cost, losses beyond belief | March 14

The toll of COVID-19 staggers and saddens. However, what I find beyond belief is that we persist with accounting and resist accountability. Vaccination appears to be denting death rates among those with the highest vaccination rates. This is a pandemic which will be suppressed, but not eradicated. There is much, besides pursuing herd immunity, which we should have done and which we still should do to spare life.

To obtain this reset, we must transition from describing the sensational what happened to asking the still vital why it happened. Apply the average death rate of 193 other nations to the United States and COVID-19 ought to have killed about 94,000 Americans, instead of 534,315. Or the virus should have killed 22,122 had we performed as well as several top tier countries, or about half of our actual casualties had we merely matched the rates of Canada, Germany and a number or merely average pandemic managers.

Several studies have shown that up to one-third of the excess mortality over the past year may be attributable to the effects of the measures used to combat the pandemic, rather than the disease itself. The costs were not simply economic, educational and social. When one is manifestly on the wrong route, it is time to stop and ask directions.

Pat Byrne, Largo

Tim Scott is doing the Republican Party a huge favor. The rest of us, not so much | Column, March 13

Columnist Leonard Pitts capacity for deductive reasoning is sorely lacking. Not only does he fail to understand what woke supremacy is political correctness on steroids he fails to recognize its significance.

I did not see the MSNBC interview in question, but when I read Pitts column I knew immediately what Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C., meant. I applaud his courage in making the statement. We need more men and women of like mind to speak out and lower the heat of the cancel culture gripping both left and right before it boils over again. We do not need another January 6th capitol invasion.

Daniel J. Hill, Tampa

Want to know what socialists really think? Ask one | Letters, March 15

A recent letter writer seems to think that socialism is Medicare for all, tuition free college, and an end to forever wars. That does not sound like socialism to me. The textbook definition of socialism is a place where the state owns the facilities and all the workers are government employees. In the United Kingdom, for instance, medical facilities are owned by the government and the medical and administrative staff work for the government. Medicare for all is just government insurance for all, not socialism. As long as you can choose a private insurer, then I dont see the problem.

Do we have socialized medicine in the U.S.? Of course we do. Its called the veterans health care system and the military health care system. The facilities are owned by the government and the medical and administrative staff are government employees. Does it work? The vast majority of veterans (like me) and military personnel think so. Would it work for everyone else? I doubt it, and I would be against it, but lets be careful about how we define socialism.

Ron Scoggins, St. Petersburg

What to know about Floridas 2021 legislative session | Feb. 25

In Florida, when I stare at the beautiful coast, I often see it littered with all types of plastics. What upsets me is knowing that other people have the same thoughts, and we have the ability to change this, but forget our voices. To start finding that voice, we must re-address this to our government, who play a critical role in alleviating the single-use plastic pollution problem. It starts with telling our representatives and senators to cosponsor state House and Senate bills like HB 6027, HB 1563, SB 594 and SB 1348. These either focus on repealing the preemptions on single-use plastics, or tell the state Department of Environmental Protection to update its plastic bag report. It is time to rise-up, and use our voices, since taking care of the environment is ensuring all of our futures. We need to tell our legislators to rise above and break free from plastics.

Sanaa Ali, St. Petersburg

Florida senators advance bill eliminating drop boxes and limiting vote by mail | March 10

So Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, an undertaker who thinks he knows everything about creating a successful career, wants to penalize high-achieving college students who seek insight, discernment and communication skills by studying the arts and humanities. Of course he does if only to limit the number of broadly educated voters who can see through his empty rhetoric and self-serving schemes. Voter suppression is already a strategy of todays Republican party. Apparently, educational suppression is not far behind.

Jim Harper, Tampa

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On COVID, its time for a hard accounting of what went wrong | Letters - Tampa Bay Times

We are not being targeted right now, but Islamophobia is still a problem in Slovakia, says Islamic Foundation director.

When Mohamad Safwan Hasna moved from his native Syria to then Czechoslovakia as part of a student exchange programme in late 1991, he didnt know much about the country or its people.

To be honest, I originally thought that Bratislava was a part of Prague, because the Czech Republic was more well-known in Syria at the time, Hasna said.

In the years that followed, Hasna, a practicing Muslim, connected with other members of the Muslim community and helped established the General Union of Muslim Students in 1993. The union regularly held Days of Islamic Culture, which included multi-day lectures on Islam, workshops and food tastings in Istropolis, a now neglected culture and congress centre in Bratislava.

They're very pleasant memories; there wasn't that much hatred for us [Muslims] back then, said Hasna. Slovaks had a sincere interest in getting to know other cultures, due, in part, to their years of isolation during socialism.

16. Mar 2021 at 7:00 |Anna Fay

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Muslims were more accepted in Slovakia shortly after the fall of socialism - The Slovak Spectator

What to make of the Paris Commune? At the end of the nineteenth century, this was one of the key questions facing socialists. While the Commune had ended in a terrible defeat in May 1871, the executed Communards were celebrated as martyrs who had fallen in the front line of struggle. And in the decades after its crushing, socialists and anarchists reached for lessons from what they took for a unique practical experience.

In late nineteenth-century France, both survivors of the Commune (Louise Michel, Benot Malon, douard Vaillant) and those who supported it from outside Paris (like future Socialist leader Jules Guesde, in Montpellier during spring 1871) played a major role in shaping the multiple tendencies of French socialism. But the Communes memory was also kept alive by militants far beyond French shores, with March 18 commemorations each year celebrating the Communards glorious actions. From Berlin to Moscow, from London to Budapest, and soon even in Tokyo and Shanghai, the word Commune meant the Paris revolution and the heroic Communards who had fallen in combat.

The anniversary of the Commune was marked with particular ceremony in Germany, where the Social Democrats (SPD) had by the 1880s become Europes most strongly rooted workers party. In fact, this date had a rather particular meaning in Berlin. The Paris Communes own history was inextricably linked to the Franco-Prussian War; most Communards had made their patriotism clear, with the call to defend France, and Paris itself, mixed in with more properly social objectives. This international conflict made German displays of solidarity with the Commune as organized by Social Democracys founding fathers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel all the more heroic.

Coincidentally, March 18 invoked not only the start of the Paris uprising in 1871 but also the barricades erected in Berlin back in 1848. This date thus provided militants an opportunity to celebrate the two countries shared revolutionary heritage. Each of these insurrections had ended in defeat and victory for the counterrevolutionary forces. But they also marked out a path to the future and the bases of a new society.

In an era where both countries ruling classes were cultivating a harsh chauvinism, the celebration of this both French and German anniversary was one of the first concrete attempts at building an internationalist culture. This was no merely theoretical proposition: the gigantic marches that the German and Austrian Social-Democrats organized in Berlin and Vienna (and many other industrial towns) in 1898 to mark the half-centenary of 1848 also honored the French experience.

Such events show how attached militants were to this shared memory. Yet, it would be wrong to consider these demonstrations as a simple appeal to put up barricades like in 1871. For the Paris Commune also provided an experience of defeat, from which socialists had to learn.

In The Civil War in France, Marx had hailed the Commune as a political experience of a new type. His solidarity was all the more keenly felt given that the Communards had just been mercilessly crushed (he wrote this text just after the end of the uprising). But, while the Communards contribution was not in doubt, once the flames had been snuffed out Marx and Engels also showed themselves prepared to express criticisms of some of the Communes methods.

For instance, on January 14, 1871, Engels wrote to Italian Bakuninite Carlo Terzaghi (later found to have been a police informant) that If there had been a little more authority and centralization in the Paris Commune, it would have triumphed over the bourgeois. And when people tell me that these are two things to be condemned outright, it seems to me that those who talk like this either do not know what a revolution is, or are revolutionaries in name only. In this sense pushing back against some of the passages in The Civil War in France which most leaned in the direction of decentralization, Engels insisted that any political revolution lacking a centralized authority was doomed.

A few years later, Marx himself offered a critical examination of this experience. On February 22, 1881, he wrote to the Dutchman Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis: Apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be. With a small amount of sound common sense, however, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people the only thing that could be reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to dissolve all the pretensions of the Versailles people in terror, etc., etc.

In an October 29, 1884 letter to Bebel, Engels was even more abrupt: While the Commune was the grave of early specifically French socialism, it was, for France, also and at the same time the cradle of a new international communism. Yet, in other texts, the Commune was still taken for an example. In an 1891 preface to The Civil War in France, Engels concluded that the Commune had been an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat the dictatorship of the majority over a minority of exploiters. So, the Commune was doubtless something to be celebrated. But was this a model, or an experience that socialists had to go beyond?

Ten years after this preface (and following Engelss death in 1895), in 1901 Marxs son-in-law Charles Longuet (husband to Marxs daughter Jenny) published a new edition of Marxs text, with a telling change of title: The Civil War in France was now The Paris Commune. Longuet clearly sought to avoid the reference to civil war and instead promote a gradualist perspective within socialist ranks.

Indeed, at this point a major trend in several socialist parties was raising questions over the revolutionary road to socialism which most had previously pursued. The leading representative of this current was the German Eduard Bernstein, whose 1899 text The Preconditions of Socialism had bemoaned the popularity of the Blanquist tradition (named after Louis Auguste Blanqui, with whom many of the Communards had close ties). Bernstein also mounted a wider attack against the French revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1871; he held that it was time to put an end to a certain insurrectionary spirit that, he claimed, undermined the gradual development of organized socialism.

What could explain such a turn? First, it is worth emphasizing that a large share of the workers movement rejected Bernsteins perspective, from Jules Guesde to Rosa Luxemburg. But doubtless, since 1871 the political context had changed a great deal. By the turn of the twentieth century, the workers movement had built up its own parties, union organizations and co-ops. Male universal suffrage had been enacted in several European countries. So, would it be possible to conquer power by other, legal means?

One telling example was Jean Jaurs, alongside Guesde the main founder of Frances unified Socialist Party in 1905. He was unabashed in celebrating the Communes achievements, in particular its social and political measures. But upon the March 18, 1907 anniversary, in his column for lHumanit (titled Yesterday and Tomorrow) he argued that even if the Paris Commune had been victorious it would not have been able to fundamentally transform society it could perhaps have advanced the development of the Third Republic by ten years, but it could not have made socialism spring from the ground.

Jaurs emphasized that socialists now had to take two other major realities into consideration: universal suffrage (allowing the Socialist Party to conquer positions within the existing society) and the general strike (one of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) unions main means of action, which allowed the proletariat to mount a coordinated offensive action that nonetheless stood distant from a desperate insurrection). In short, while Jaurs hailed the Communards heroic efforts, it was necessary to find other ways forward.

Some former Communards, like Benot Malon, were themselves among the originators of socialist reformism. Ten years after the Paris events, in 1881 Malon invoked the Paris Commune in order to exalt the concrete politics that could be done at the municipal in French, communal level: [s]een in these terms, the communal question is more than half of the social question.

And after him, a whole current of French socialism including Albert Thomas, future Armaments Minister during World War I placed their hopes in this municipalist perspective. Through such men, a reforming socialism took shape, with the rise of an idea of a Republic that provided public services. They mourned the insurgent Communes martyrs but took only a few concrete measures from this experience thus hollowing out its more properly subversive content.

Whatever the differences between socialist currents, they all more or less agreed that they needed organization, in order to allow them to overcome the Communes shortcomings.

This fact should not be taken lightly. Indeed, put in its proper context, the success of the party-form in the late nineteenth-century socialist movement owed a great deal to the lessons drawn from the Commune. The Paris revolutionaries of 1871 were honored for having shown the way. But it was also urgently necessary to go further than the Commune had, and take a different approach that could avoid fresh defeats. If it had not been for the trauma of 1871, it is far from clear that socialist currents like the Russian Bolsheviks or the French Guesdists would have theorized and put into practice such structured and hierarchical forms of organization.

Bolshevism in particular probably would not have taken the form it did if it were not for the Communards experience. While in the 1880s some had drawn the lesson that it was necessary to avoid any violent rupture, others instead insisted on the need to conquer the state apparatus and turn it against the enemies of the revolution. The Communes example thus molded the identity of the left wing of the international socialist movement.

Lenin showed his intense admiration for the Communards bold attempt. But he wanted the future dictatorship of the proletariat (of which Marx and Engels have spoken) to adopt means adequate to its revolutionary politics, in order to avoid fresh Bloody Weeks and further proletarian defeats. Yet while he was critical of the Communes methods, he also drew on this experience to define proletarian democracy in his State and Revolution, written a few months before the insurrection of October 1917. From Marxs The Civil War in France he took the idea of smashing the state in order to fight against bureaucracy:

Let us learn revolutionary boldness from the Communards; let us see in their practical measures the outline of really urgent and immediately possible measures, and then, following this road, we shall achieve the complete destruction of bureaucracy.

When Soviet power had lasted one day longer than the Paris Commune, Lenin celebrated the passing of a key threshold for the Russian Revolution. The Parisian experience was widely discussed and studied in the young Soviet Russia: for all its limits, hadnt the Commune shown the way, in many fields?

The young communist movement adopted themes from the Commune like proletarian democracy, workers control, educational progress, and the fight against religious obscurantism. From 1917 onward, the Commune was all the more keenly commemorated because it appeared to whole generations of militants, of all tendencies, as the event which had heralded the new times.

It is rather less clear which aspects of the Commune continue to inspire the socialist movement today, and which are instead considered out of step with our contemporary realities. In this sense, the strategic debates which Jaurs and Lenin launched centering on the Commune, the state and the forms of social and political change are still ongoing. Indeed, they complement the reflection and the insights of the actors from the period that immediately followed the Commune.

Today, historians tend to look back to the Commune as an experience unto itself, distinct from the wider course of the revolutionary movement. This is a perfectly legitimate approach allowing us a closer understanding of the Communards as actors, and their motivations. Yet it would be mistaken to overlook the interpretations and disputes that raged in the workers movement of subsequent decades, taking 1871 as a point of departure. For the debates around the Commune posed major political questions facing any project of social transformation problems that are still far from resolved.

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The Communards Were More Than Just Beautiful Martyrs - Jacobin magazine

A new point-in-time report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shows that homelessness increased significantly during the Trump administration. The report includes a detailed snapshot of the state of homelessness in the US in January of 2020just before the COVID-19 pandemic set inand compares it to figures from previous years.

It stands as an indictment of the Trump administration and begs the question of exactly how many more people have become homeless over the last year as millions lost their jobs and fell behind on their rent or mortgages.

The report found that essentially all major metrics of homelessness are on the rise. At the beginning of 2020, there were over 580,000 homeless people in the US, or just under one in 500. Last year was the fourth consecutive year of growth in the homeless population in the country.

While the homeless population under the Trump administration increased by some 30,000 people, or about five percent, the number of unsheltered homelessthose who lacked any sort of nighttime shelter at all, for example, a carincreased by 28 percent. Moreover, the number of chronically homeless people, those who have been homeless for over a year or who are consistently in and out of homelessness, increased by a massive 40 percent, reaching levels last seen only in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis.

The growth in homelessness was distributed across both red and blue states, those traditionally controlled by the Republicans and Democrats respectively, though Democratic stronghold states tend to have much higher homelessness rates. California has the largest single state homeless count at 130,000, and percentage-wise is only behind Washington D.C., New York and Hawaii. In President Joe Bidens home state of Delaware, an infamous tax haven, homelessness increased by 26 percent between 2019 and 2020.

But the report only describes the prevailing conditions that existed before the pandemic.

From the beginning the World Socialist Web Site has characterized the COVID-19 pandemic as a trigger event. That is to say, the pandemic has not created a nightmare out of a good situation, but that the preexisting social setup laid the foundation forif not the pandemic itselfits fallout, including mass deaths and economic destitution.

The HUD will not release a similar report for January 2021 until early 2022. But until then, a study of some key events of 2020 allows for an informed guess as to how these figures have risen still further over the course of the pandemic. While the pandemic changed everyday life in many ways, it did not change either the basic policies of the ruling class or its attitude towards the working class.

Almost immediately after the stock market crash in March 2020, unemployment in the country skyrocketed to over 15 percent. While it has since fallen back down, the current official figure of six percent is still higher than in previous years and is an underestimation of the real level.

When lockdowns were first instituted in March of last year, some 22 million jobs were lost. There has not been one week in the last year in which combined state and federal jobless claims did not total more than one million.

In September of last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Trump implemented a freeze on evictions as an emergency measure to fight the pandemic. From the beginning, however, the moratorium was laced with conditions that were stacked in favor of landlords. Residents had to prove that they were impacted by the pandemic, that their income was below a certain threshold and that they had lost income in order to be protected.

Under Biden, the CDC has since adopted decidedly antiscientific policies. Most recently it has recommended reducing social distancing from six feet to three feet as a means to help the ruling class reopen schools. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it, Science evolves. In other words, the CDCs policy is to be subordinated to the prerogatives of the ruling class. One can expect the ban on evictions to evolve along similar lines.

When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017 and left 50,000 people displaced, Trump made a spectacle of tossing paper towels to the audience at a press conference on the island. Bidens response to the victims of the Texas catastrophe last month was different only in that it was better stage-managed. The federal aid given to Texas was equally threadbare as that given to Puerto Rico, and little is being done to help those bankrupted by five-figure electric bills after the storm.

The CARES Act eclipsed the 2008 bailout of the banks by making trillions of dollars of virtually free money available to the financial elite. In the same year that the wealth of the worlds billionaires grew to new heights, with figures like Bezos, Musk, Gates and Zuckerberg seeing their net worth surpass $100 billion, the working class lost their jobs, housing and quite frequently their lives.

The much-touted American Recovery Act will provide limited and temporary aid to millions of workers in desperate need. Called the most progressive bill since the New Deal, it establishes no new social programs, implements no taxes on the rich and all of its provisions will expire before the end of the year.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy summed it up well, Almost everything in this bill is simply an extension of the programs that Republicans were wildly enthusiastic about back when they were in charge of the White House and the Senate.

Although Trump is out of office, the Biden administration is continuing his most important policies. His administration is continuing and even accelerating the aggressive maneuvers against China and is carrying out the same xenophobic attacks on immigrants.

One can be sure that on the question of housing, Biden will adopt the same manner of anti-working class policies as his predecessor, and that the horrific rise reported on conditions during the Trump administration will continue under Bidens. Combating this requires a decisive break with both parties of capitalism and the fight for socialism to reorganize society to meet the needs of humanity.

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Homelessness in the US exploded before the pandemic - WSWS